In my role as the weekend webmaster for Rainbow Cinemas, I have on occasion the need to compare local and remote (ftp or ssh) files between my staging server and the production website; I also have to compare files between my local Eclipse projects and my local CVS repo, to see why and when changes were made.
So, what do I use? Well, I run KDE on my MEPIS box, so I've set up Konqueror profiles for the various admin tasks I need to do. For the web, I split a Konq window into four panes and can drag/drop files between local and remote, and also compare local and remote versions of the site.
When diffing files, I use Beyond Compare 2 (or Cirrus, their new beta), and have quite enjoyed it since the dark ages (circa Eclipse 3.0) when I first joined the IBM Toronto Lab (which isn't in Toronto anymore, but I digress). It's my not-so-secret weapon for releng work, web work, java work, ... really, everything. BC supports comparing/synching from local to a remote FTP site, but in most cases I find it slow as it has to download all the remote files, compare them to the local ones, and update the view. It's handy for single file compares or small folder compares, but doing entire trees requires a lot of patience as it builds the diff tree. So, more often than not, I just use Konqueror for swapping files back and forth, since its ftp and fish ioslaves rock. (This is perhaps the biggest reason I won't change to another wm like gnome or xfce.)
I can be pretty jaded sometimes when it comes to trying new software, especially if I've grown happy and complacent using a set of tools that I find work well. Switching to something new doesn't necessarily mean finding something better; often it just means time wasted and functionality lost.
While it's cool to use a mix of tools, sometimes it's nice when you can do everything in a single IDE. So, to that end, this past weekend I started playing with DSDP's Target Management (TM) offering. Very cool. It doesn't do folder compares yet, though there's been some talk about how that could be implemented either at the Eclipse Compare level or at the DSDP-TM level. I like being able to finally browse remote files within an Eclipse view (rather than in Konq or Konsole), but the absence of folder-to-folder comparison makes TM a bit of a non-starter for me, so far.
So, to that end, I opened bug 203001 to see if folder compares were possible, and now I'm realizing that it's both not a trivial thing to implement and also introduces some philosophical questions about "derivative work", "ethical competetion", "changing your business model" and "reinventing the wheel".
If there's a commercial piece of software, like Beyond Compare, with a superior (IMHO) diff engine, should they be persuaded to contribute to Eclipse? The current version of BC can be launched from inside Eclipse using Beyond CVS, and it does the job when Eclipse's internal compare isn't enough. But it's not a plugin, nor does it integrate into the IDE. It also requires WINE, but this is being addressed in Cirrus (BC3), with a linux-friendly qt version.
But should Scooter provide their code to Eclipse, and potentially lose customers in order to make Eclipse's Compare better?
If they did, they could grow their market share and get some good PR, but they wouldn't sell licenses. They could instead switch to a donation/swag model, I suppose.
Or they could sell a standalone RCP app version with just their compare stuff in it, so people could choose between the free integrated-in-Eclipse version and the paid standalone version. Problem is, integrated in Eclipse is much more useful IMHO so I'd think that would be a non-starter too.
What would you do, if you were were Scooter?
Conversely, if you were a committer for Eclipse Compare or DSDP-TM, how much functionality in BC would you attempt to recreate, given that you're reinventing the wheel, and that by giving it away for free you're taking business from a small company who's been in the biz of compare for years. I mean, sure, it would be great if all the functionality of BC was in Eclipse so that IBM could build on it and sell product based on it, but personally I'd feel a very dirty if by opening a feature request against DSDP-TM / Eclipse Compare I was helping IBM make money at the expense of all the good work Scooter has done over the years to make my life (and my job at IBM) so much easier.
Me, I'd just like to see a way to hook in different compare engines (eg., via a plugin like Beyond CVS), but is doing the work to allow what's in Eclipse Compare to be replaced by something else in Eclipse's best interest?
Yes, there'll always be competition in the marketplace, but how does a community like Eclipse compete ethically in a situation like this? And if open source is about enabling business to succeed faster/better/smarter/whatever (among other motivations), how do small companies survive if their product gets replaced by a free open source alternative? Does anyone have experience with their product being "Eclipsed" by something free?
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